The Girl from Station X (49 page)

I have watched again the family movies that my mother had made in the 1950s, put on to video for her by Mr Mainwaring just before she started losing her mind; she had shown some to me a few
months before I got breast cancer. My daughter sat with me the second time I watched these and commented how sweet I was as a little girl. In one, I was on a swing, seated between Gig and my
grandmother. I had been a much-loved child.

I saw me and Raymond in thick beds of wallflowers at North Heath – he a little boy making his first steps. Later, myself and Raymond playing in the sandpit at North Heath House, in our
Coronation outfits of red jumpers and navy-blue shorts – then we were running across the lawn carrying Union Jacks. Here we two were with Captain, then there was Nicky in a paddling pool,
then me leaning over his pram, he in a duffel coat. He looked healthy and confident, so different from the timid, fragile boy and teenager he became later.

Some of the last shots were of me and Raymond in a sea of poppies. This was almost the last film my mother ever took of Raymond, and our last summer in North Heath.

There were two more shots, of me and my grandmother, also at North Heath. Perhaps she had given us a new tricycle, because she was pushing first me, then Raymond, on it. The very last picture of
all was my grandmother giving me a push and me sailing off on my own. As I watched this, I felt that my grandmother and I were the survivors, had weathered the storms, my grandmother had shown me
how.

And what of North Heath House and its enchanted common? I returned there with my son soon after my first book was published, forty years after my seventh birthday. It was Frank
who had collected us children that day and driven us to Knowle; Raymond and I had sucked barley sugars to avoid being carsick. Doreen had already left us; now I sometimes think of her letter to me
ending
How I loved you all
and wish I had been able to respond more affectionately.

Nicholas, on our visit to North Heath in 1995, even suggested I become a lodger for a while in a house nearby. He and I walked on the common and down the lane, where I recalled old man’s
beard in the hedgerows in winter. Raymond and I had wandered together down that lane one day, thinking that we had seen Doreen go that way. She was furious and, probably having been frightened for
our safety, smacked our bottoms for not staying on the common.

I have returned a few times to North Heath after that visit of 1995, twice in summer, when I walked again in the Merry Meadow where I had once walked with my mother. I saw again the cornflowers,
not quite as blue as my mother’s eyes, and the waving scarlet poppies of my childhood. I found myself peering through North Heath House’s hedge at the huge copper beech tree in the
garden where I used to play with Raymond – and I realised that I was looking for my brother.

On my last visit I went inside the house, invited by the owner, and into what had been my old bedroom, where, rather like Black Beauty among the apple trees in the book I had read often as a
child, I had once looked out on to a little orchard with pear trees. I stood inside our old front door and gazed out at the lawn where I had played with my little brothers, and with Captain. I
smelt again the scent of the polyanthus in spring; it was as though I was in heaven.

My mother died in August 2003. The death certificate gave two causes, ‘congestive cardiac failure’ and ‘alcohol induced dementia’. She had had to be removed from Camelot
due to physical deterioration and had been in a home run by nuns for those with Alzheimer’s for one and a half years – it was the same order of nuns that had run the homes I had looked
at for her in the mid-1990s. I enjoyed visiting my mother here without interference – the three nuns, and their staff, made it so easy and pleasant – and she seemed content, sitting in
the daytime with other women in a large bright room looking over a valley. On one visit, at a nun’s suggestion, I even fed my mother her evening meal with a spoon.

By then I had read all her diaries and felt closer to her. On one visit I put my hand on her arm and told her: ‘Well done! Well done for writing those diaries.’ I hope she
understood.

When she first moved in, I took in two photographs for her, one of my father in naval uniform and one of me with her, in Madrid. I am in a little white dress and look serene and happy. My mother
is smiling straight at me; her attention entirely on me, as it never was in later years. She seems delighted with me.

Six days after my mother’s death, I found on my kitchen table a letter. It was as though a wind had blown it in, directly from her to me. In fact, my daughter had found it in her own files
that morning and put it there.

May 3rd 1991.

Dear Elisa,

I am so glad that you enjoyed the film show of Spain and saw yourself as a child, together with darling Raymond on the beach at (I think) Comillas and Dad as a young man
with you, looking very handsome and all of us happy as we were. I was particularly happy to hear that darling Nicholas is so interested about Raymond and asks questions about him – I have so
often thought that those two were very alike, in their gentleness, intelligence, good looks and charm. Both so delightful in every way and most lovable and loved.

Hope to see you about the twelfth. L. has made such an
excellent
drawing of the pony’s head. Give my love to her and Nicholas. Love
from,
Mum

The letter had been written just before my mother started to lose her mind. I had been so angry about her frequent falls and drunkenness I had not taken it in. Now I wondered if her inadequacy
in relation to my son was partly because he had reminded her, as a small boy, of Raymond. I see from my diary about a visit to Hope Cove with her in summer 1985, when Nicholas was nearly two, that
my mother seemed to get quite attached to Nicholas on that holiday and once, when he came out of the bath carried in a towel, her eyes filled with tears
. I had even added:
I daresay she relates to Raymond at that age.
Unfortunately I see from another entry that she secretly bought a bottle of whisky while shopping with my husband.
As a result she was completely plastered before supper. I was extremely annoyed.
I had named my son Nicholas after my brother but never addressed him as
‘Nicky’; it was too painful. I had not consulted my mother about my son’s name and she had not referred to it. Now I wonder if her failure to find the church where Nicholas was
christened was something to do with this.

After her death, I started visiting the graves at Frant, as she used to do, and had their headstones cleaned, according to my mother’s wishes. I took a photograph one
January of the tiny graves of the two Raymonds, her little brother and mine, side by side, covered with snowdrops. (I found an envelope among Aunt K’s papers with a lock of his hair in it,
and written in the left-hand corner ‘Violets’. He had died at his Aunt Lin’s, on Nah’s birthday, 14 December 1918.) I visit the other graves – my parents’, Aunt
K’s and Nicky’s, his in another part of the churchyard, next to a young woman who was born and died at exactly the same age as him. I once met her mother there, bringing flowers. I
would like to be buried next to Nicky.

In 2000, I visited Serbia, and found Novi Knezevac, the village, then in the new Yugoslavia, where my mother and Jean had stayed in 1937 and 1938. I went to Germany, twice, and returned to some
of their owners the passports my mother took of those former prisoners of war. Just before she died, I heard from the Imperial War Museum that two pages of her Bletchley diaries would be exhibited
there in a special temporary exhibition,
Women at War
. How proud she would have been.

Six years after my mother’s death, I visited Comillas and the house we had rented those two summers so long ago. In its sloping garden I looked at once for the hydrangeas, where Raymond
and I would run down to spot the big white boat on the horizon. As I had at North Heath, I realised I wanted to see him again. At last, I really could feel sorry for my mother and for
her
lost paradise. (She had once shown my daughter, but not me, photographs of
her
little brother.) I knew that if I had not had access to her diaries, I would not have had the
means to understand her, or her life. Also, she had opened my eyes to larger aspects of history – I would never be able now to go to certain parts of London without remembering her
descriptions of it during the war. Because of her diaries, I had had vivid glimpses into pre-war Rome under Mussolini, post-war Germany with its bombed towns and starving old women running for coal
falling off lorries, and Yugoslavia in the 1930s before the Nazis, then the Communists, got there. Most importantly for me, my mother had given me, to reinforce my own early memories, those
pictures of Spain. How grateful I am that she wrote about that lost Spain of my childhood, with its shepherds, its white oxen, its storks on their nests, and of Comillas – of how, that
afternoon of 2 September 1953, she had gone into the sea leaving me alone on the sand. Then I had waded in to meet her, the water above my waist:
I was so proud of her
.
Taking that last ‘Spain’ diary, I found the long, long beach where huge waves dashed wildly against the shore – the beach where my mother had walked back to me out of the sea.

I
would like to thank my two children, my son for his insights into both my parents, although he never met my father, and my daughter for her
wisdom and loyalty.

I would particularly like to thank Matthew Bell for his editing skills and encouragement, and my previous editor James Loader, above all for his sympathetic understanding of my mother’s
character.

Alex Clark of Union Books has since then done many hours of patient editing, and Rosalind Porter, also of Union Books, besides later editing, has performed other important tasks. I am grateful
to them and to David Graham for publishing my book. Clare Alexander, my former agent, kindly read my contract.

I am indebted to my former therapist Maya Parker – who once made an omelette for herself during a session – for her knowledge of alcoholism and for her intelligent and sensitive
interpretations of my mother.

Duncan Fallowell continues to give me spot-on advice and wrote me a wonderful letter after my mother’s death.

Others who gave me help and encouragement are: Kirsty Gunn, Rachel Calvocoressi, Robert Skidelsky, Rupert Christiansen, Ricardo Mateos, Jimmy Burns, Sheila Yates, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann,
the late John Keegan, the late Ralph Bennett, Andrew Fergusson-Cuninghame, the late Honor Anstruther, Sue Gaisford, Nicholas Gibbs, Alex Gage, Henrietta Foster, Katie Joll, my three cousins Edward
Hamilton, Cate Stone and Elizabeth Constantine, and my late Aunt Rosemary – a very good aunt. Thank you to Hilary Greene, Charles Kidd, (editor of Debretts who compiled family trees at short
notice), and Margy Kinmonth, who introduced me to Kelsey Griffin, Director of Museum Operations and Museum Relations at the Bletchley Park Trust. Katherine Lynch, Media Manager at Bletchley,
arranged for some passages about my mother’s work there to be checked. The late Tony Sale read my mother’s Bletchley diaries and commented with expertise, as did the late Peter
Calvocoressi.

I would like to thank my American cousin Dita for her memories of my grandmother and for being such a friend to me. Similarly my beloved American godmother Leith, my mother’s old friend,
who is nearly a hundred.

I am grateful to Victoria Blake-Tyler, for sharing our early childhood memories of Spain and for shedding light on some of the political and historical background of that time. Beville Pain was
also very knowledgeable about this and about diplomatic life. Hugo Vickers was tireless in referencing characters in Madrid in the early 1950s.

Jenny Sivyer gave me her grandfather Frank Sivyer’s memoir of life in the Sussex countryside in the early 1900s which included Knowle, my grandparents’ house. Pat Wright of Frant
typed this out and supplied some local history.

I am extremely grateful to Lorraine Pinkerton and Heather Sewell, who let me visit Knowle so often after it was sold; Heather’s daughter Anna showed a touching curiosity about my mother as
a little girl.

Thank you also to those who helped me put onto computer my mother’s inscrutable handwritten diaries: Diana Bundy, Helen Stevenson, Alice Yates and Anne Wheeler. And to Susan Hauser who
kindly visited the old people’s homes with me in Sussex.

I would like to remember my mother’s three loyal friends (now deceased) who gave me their time and sympathy: Jean O’Neill, Angela Harding and Diana Tennant.

I thank Pat Woodley and Mrs Wilson for finding the diaries and above all I thank my mother for writing them.